RELEASE: New Urban Food Scraps Collection Project Gets Off to a Soaring Start

In just four weeks, the Food Scraps Drop Spot has diverted almost 3,000 pounds of food scraps from the landfill.

Since August 13th, residents of multi-unit buildings in the downtown communities have been bringing the food scraps that they collect over the week to the West End Farmers Market on Saturdays for composting. To date, the project had almost 600 drops, with most food scraps coming from the West End and Yaletown neighbourhoods.

“We are hitting our targets right off the bat and we expect our numbers to continue increasing after the Labour Day weekend when many residents return to the city,” said Louise Schwarz, the co-owner of Recycling Alternative. “Residents in apartments and condos are responding with great enthusiasm for this project because they have been craving a solution to divert their food scraps for a long time. The majority of residents dropping off are already asking us what will happen after Oct 15th when the pilot is complete.”

This project is a joint initiative between the Vancouver Farmers Markets and Recycling Alternative, with partial funding provided by a Greenest City Neighbourhood Grant from the City of Vancouver. It is designed specifically to service high density urban areas of apartments and condos, which are not included in the city’s current food scraps collection for single homes. The model implemented in this pilot is demonstrating a flexible and efficient alternative for waste management in multi-unit residences.

With the Metro Vancouver’s newly approved Solid Waste Management Plan, the Food Scraps Drop Spot is poised to be a valuable strategy for the City of Vancouver and other municipalities to meet the waste diversion targets in 2015 and 2020.

“A similar model is being implemented in New York City with great success and we are expecting the same here in Vancouver”, said Tara McDonald, the Executive Director of Vancouver Farmers Market. “We hope that our achievements in this pilot project will encourage the city to provide more funding. We definitely want to see this project return to our farmers markets and we would love to see it develop into something permanent for Vancouver’s neighbourhoods.”

The Food Scraps Drop Spot project is taking place from now until October 15th, every Saturday from 9am to 2pm at the West End Farmers Market.